Since I'm asking myself "Why, oh why do we have to discuss the same feature requests over and over again every few weeks?" I thought a little sticky thread on what features not to request (and why) might be helpful. If you are about to post a feature request that is already discussed here: don't wonder if your thread is being closed without further comment.
Anonymising the ed2k network
Another All Time Favorite, usually in combination with protocol encryption. Obfuscating where your traffic goes simply DOES NOT WORK in a P2P app. The only way to achieve (partial) anonymity would be to route all traffic through several other clients and hope at least one of them is not spying on you. Doing so and routing all traffic through just 3 other clients (hardly "secure") would cut your download speed down to a third of what it is now. If you're looking for some anonymity check freenet or tor, a P2P application is not what you are looking for.
Plugin for another protocol
amule is an ed2k application. Period. It is not a bittorrent client. And it will never be.
IRC client, File manager, kitchen machine
amule is an ed2k application. Period. If you want a file manager: There are plenty of them out there. If you want an IRC client the same applies. Let us just concentrate on our main task: Being the best ed2k application possible.
Banning spammers, querying clients / servers manually, etc
Some emule mods allow such behaviour. We see very little gain combined with a great potential of abuse in such features, that's why they won't be implemented. The spammer annoys you? Use the message filter. Your file doesn't find all sources after 23 seconds? Wait a little longer. You want to update your QR for a file every 11 seconds? Go get a life, do something useful, search for bugs in amule's source, anything.
This list is far from complete, those were just the most annoying requests that keep on resurfacing every now and then...
